I'll read the article later, but if ISIL is actually beaten, the priority has to turn to rebuilding.

ISIL have trashed everything like a bunch of drunk kids in a gold coast hotel room. If it's left to the government there to rebuild, we'll just have to fight them again in 10 years.

Send in the army engineers and get private industry involved. Give them tax breaks or something but it's going to cost billions.

Cities need to be built / re-built along with utilites. Water and electricity.

Basic Agriculture needs to be set up, something to get food.

Schools, places of business, space to create an economy, get locals working and earning an income with stuff to spend it on.

basically rebuild a country. Yes it will be expensive, but the cost is less than war and once you've got the place set up, refugees have an option to choose to go home to a decent life.

All true, but if the money is to come from outside Iraq I suspect you’d need an entirely different governance structure to have any chance of effectiveness. The billions that were poured into Iraq after the 2003 war seem to have had almost no discernible effect.

Like democracy, development and institutional solidity cannot be imposed from outside : a people have to fight for them, learn to value them, and settle upon them.

I'm just talking about the infrastructure.

How they use it has to be up to them, agreed. But we need to at least build the vessel for them to pour into, what they want._________________I'd like to apologise to anyone I haven't offended yet. Be patient, I'm working through a list. You're entitled to your own opinion, but if it disagrees with mine, it's wrong.

This may belong elsewhere but.......https://nypost.com/2017/11/18/i-was-was-an-isis-slave-and-now-im-fighting-back/_________________I'd like to apologise to anyone I haven't offended yet. Be patient, I'm working through a list. You're entitled to your own opinion, but if it disagrees with mine, it's wrong.

That is so hard to read. How do you even begin to get past that? Brave woman._________________You never look good trying to make someone else look bad. Disrespecting & insulting other to prove your point just shows how shaky your own position is.

I'd trust iran and that other mob as far as I could spit a bpwling ball,_________________I'd like to apologise to anyone I haven't offended yet. Be patient, I'm working through a list. You're entitled to your own opinion, but if it disagrees with mine, it's wrong.

That is so hard to read. How do you even begin to get past that? Brave woman.

Yes, it was hard to read, but it’s important we do so, as a kind of witness. It is hard to imagine what that woman has lived through, and hard to imagine the kind of demonic forces that animate her violators._________________Two more flags before I die!

“It was taken by Isis fighters to prevent us from leaving,” replied the man.

“Taken by Isis, or you destroyed it to hide your name? How do we know you are not an Isis commander?” asked Taha.

“I am a medic sir, I told you. Daesh forced me to go to the old city and work in their field hospital. I was there treating injured civilians and yes, I will be straight with you, I did treat some of their fighters, too, because they forced me to. But I am not Daesh, sir, I actually hate them.”

“You are a liar,” said Taha.

“I swear by Imam Abbas … ” the man began, but before he had finished his oath upon the name of one of Shia Islam’s most revered figures, Taha smacked him hard in the face, sending him tumbling back into the lap of a soldier who sat behind him.

“Don’t utter these names, you filthy animal.”

The medic picked himself up, with an insulted look on his face. “But I am an old man,” he said softly, gradually bringing back the smile to his face. If there had been a moment in which he could have saved himself, it had now passed.

Taha and the soldiers dragged the old man out of the basement and into the street. They found a deserted house attached to a large ancient church, and pushed the captive through a courtyard, up a few steps, and into a small, dark room with three tall arched windows that overlooked a cemetery. They sat him on the floor and he leaned against the base of one of the windows, his head backlit by shafts of the afternoon sunlight. They stood encircling him. “Yalla old man, why don’t you confess so we can send you away from here?” said one young officer.

The old man, still smiling, said: “But how can I confess something I haven’t done? How can I prejudice myself?”

A heavy-set soldier picked up a short, thick metal pipe and started prodding the old man’s knees with it. “Look, from the window, that rotten body over there,” he said. “That was one of your people. We captured him few days ago and he, too, refused to confess.”

The man craned his neck and looked out of the window behind him. Below the house, a bloated, decomposed body had turned black under the scorching summer sun. He turned and smiled, but there was now a hint of fear, a loss of control. “I am just a medic,” he mumbled. Taha swung his leg back and kicked the man’s face so hard that he collapsed motionless on his back. For a second, everyone in the room thought he was dead.

“Pour water on him, he is faking,” Taha said angrily.

One soldier pulled the man up and sat him down again. Slowly, he opened his eyes, which at first looked stunned, and then darkened with anger. He opened his mouth, and a dark lump of flesh, blood and a set of large, gleaming false teeth tumbled on to his chest and the floor.

“Ha, will you confess?” said the soldier with the metal pipe.

“I have nothing to say,” hissed the man with blood pouring from his mouth. Taha nodded to the heavyset soldier, who pulled the old man to his feet, his legs wobbling. He leaned the man against the arched window and then, in one quick move, the soldier flipped him out of the window, but held his feet. The old man hung, swinging, from the window.

“Are you going to confess now?” asked the soldier. “What else is left for you?”

“How can I prejudice myself?” came the faint voice of the old man from below.

In that dark room, the soldiers and officers looked at the old man’s feet, dirty and cracked, for a few seconds before they vanished from the window. He fell into the yard below with a thud. The soldier who had dropped him leaned out of the window with his machine gun and fired five bullets into the body in the rubble below. A cloud of gunpowder filled the room, dancing in the shafts of light. The soldier looked out of the window and then fired two more bullets. “These two at his legs, just in case he wants to walk home,” said the soldier, laughing.

[...]

The heritage of torture in Iraq evolved in a linear path from Saddam’s intelligence agency, the Mukhabarat, to the Americans in Abu Ghraib, and thence to the sectarian forces of the Iraqi government and its militias. Now, in the nightmare of Mosul, torture served no investigative purpose. It achieved and demanded nothing beyond an imperative to exact pain and revenge.

“I don’t want to hear his confession,” one officer said. “What will I do with it? I want him to suffer and die.”

For the lucky ones, death was swift. For Ammar, death was a luxury he had to wait for.

The officers did not see their victims as humans, let alone as fellow Iraqis: they were simply the enemy. They needed to hear the Isis soldiers who had been their tormentors begging for mercy, before they could celebrate their final victory. They needed to hear the Isis soldiers’ animal squeals of pain, in order to feel they had avenged the loss of their families. Perhaps Isis’s victory lies in its conversion of the Iraqi people to its own methods.

_________________"Pence must know that his frantic acts of abusing the sacred Olympics for confrontational ruckus are as foolish and stupid an act as sweeping the sea with a broom" – North Korean newspaper

Until I got to the last paragraph I was thinking ‘I’ll never understand the cruelty man is capable of’ but is revenge different? Still abhorrent but maybe just a tad understandable when you remember the viscous war raged by ISIS and the evil deeds done. Not to that old guy though, ragged clothes and cracked feet, I’d give him the benefit of the doubt. I don’t think anyone can really answer for what they would do in that situation unless they have been in it.

That’s a horrible read though, but obviously a story that needs to be told._________________You never look good trying to make someone else look bad. Disrespecting & insulting other to prove your point just shows how shaky your own position is.

I think it’s something that’s always struck me about the way we think about ISIS – over here, we treat them as cartoon Hollywood villains, basically like rats to be exterminated. And look, the things that their group has done are often unspeakably cruel; we shouldn’t overlook that for a second. But when we celebrate their deaths and defeat in battle, we don’t have to be there as they suffer, or see what it’s like for a scared and helpless human being who fought for the wrong side be beaten, tortured and mercilessly killed. We’re totally shielded from all that. The less abstract all this is, though, the more horrifying all this becomes. The old saying “war is hell” starts to seem more and more like a matter-of-fact statement. And however much we might identify with a desire for revenge, it’s an impulse that can only ever cause more darkness and suffering._________________"Pence must know that his frantic acts of abusing the sacred Olympics for confrontational ruckus are as foolish and stupid an act as sweeping the sea with a broom" – North Korean newspaper

I think it’s something that’s always struck me about the way we think about ISIS – over here, we treat them as cartoon Hollywood villains, basically like rats to be exterminated. And look, the things that their group has done are often unspeakably cruel; we shouldn’t overlook that for a second. But when we celebrate their deaths and defeat in battle, we don’t have to be there as they suffer, or see what it’s like for a scared and helpless human being who fought for the wrong side be beaten, tortured and mercilessly killed. We’re totally shielded from all that. The less abstract all this is, though, the more horrifying all this becomes. The old saying “war is hell” starts to seem more and more like a matter-of-fact statement. And however much we might identify with a desire for revenge, it’s an impulse that can only ever cause more darkness and suffering.

Killing IS fighters and active sympathisers is necessary to scrape this filthy ideology off the face of earth, but like Abu Ghraib (for which I would cheerfully see D Rumsfeld and General R Sanchez tried), this is clearly something quite different.

It is a very painful read, and no doubt many things like it happened, as they do during, and after, every unspeakably filthy war. Still, it raises several difficult questions : what had the fellow really done, and what did his tormentors know ? Maybe nothing, maybe something hideous. Take away context, and you subtract most of the meaning of any event. And while revenge is indeed an ugly emotion, where does retributive justice end and revenge take over ?_________________Two more flags before I die!

Last edited by Mugwump on Thu Dec 07, 2017 12:56 am; edited 3 times in total

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